River bank erosion along the Ganges in Malda and Murshidabad districts
River bank erosion along the Ganges in Malda and Murshidabad districts focusses on river bank erosion along the main channel of the Ganges in Malda and Mushidabad districts of West Bengal, India.
The Ganges is a long river carrying a huge discharge of 70,000 m3/s. However, the river bank erosion problems are restricted to a few places. Floods and erosion pose a serious problem in the lower Ganges region, particularly in West Bengal. The Ganges enters West Bengal after/ near Rajmahal hills in Jharkhand. After flowing through Malda district, it enters Murshidabad district, where it splits into two river channels – the Bhagirathi flows south through West Bengal and the Padma flows east into Bangladesh. River bank erosion is a common problem in river channels in the deltaic tracts and is widespread throughout the course of the Ganges in West Bengal. Official reports show that on an average 8 km2 of land is engulfed annually by the river in West Bengal.
The Ganges forms one of the major river systems in India. From the Gangotri Glacier, it traverses a distance of 2,525 km to the Bay of Bengal. The river carries millions of tonnes of sediment load and deposits it in the plains. The sediment deposition creates many severe problems like the decrease of river depth.
The Ganges is a meandering river and Farakka Barrage has disrupted the dynamic equilibrium of the river and hindered the natural oscillation of the river within its meandering belt, which is about 10 km wide in Malda and Murshidabad districts.The river has a general tendency to shift towards the left bank upstream of the Farakka Barrage and towards the right bank below the Farakka Barrage. River bank failure is because of certain factors like soil stratification of the river bank, presence of hard rocky area (Rajmahal), high load of sediment, difficulty of dredging and construction of Farakka Barrage as an obstruction to the natural river flow.The rivers in Murshidabad district have been continuously changing its meandering-geometry actively since second half of the twentieth century but the dimension of river bank erosion has been increased after construction of Farakka Barrage.More than 200 km2 of fertile land was completely wiped out till 2004 in Malda district. As of 2004, the Ganges had eroded 356 km2 of fertile land and displaced around 80,000 people in the period 1988 – 1994, in Murshidabad district.
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